We’re living in an era of unprecedented pornography consumption: last year nearly 80 billion videos were streamed on PornHub alone. Stories of sneaking nudie magazines out of a familial secret stash are essentially apocryphal now that you can see whoever you want doing whatever you want with just a basic knowledge of Google. Porn is free, categorized, and available in HD. Nothing is off-limits. Go enjoy yourself, just make sure to plug in your headphones.
There’s no going back from this, and much has been made about what the new age of on-demand porn might mean. We are overexposed, maybe, or desensitized at the very least. And yet the wild lack of subtlety of a situation in which we have online porn at our fingertips may have subtler effects on the human spirit than we think.
So much of our relationship with smut had to do with lust: the physical need, the delay spent thinking of how to satisfy it, the discoveries that shape you, rather than you shaping your discoveries—even just spending real dollars and cents in exchange for a few moments you’ll never speak about again. Is masturbation less fun when it’s easy? When it’s just something you do with an open tab and you feel a fleeting appetite? Was there something magical about that elusive, intangible ache? For the contributors at Reddit’s GoneWildAudio, the answer is yes.
GoneWildAudio relies on a pretty simple formula. It’s a place where you can upload your very own amateur erotic audio files for the enjoyment of the no-chill masses. Browse the hallowed halls and you’ll find a surprising amount of variety. Do you have a very particular flight attendant fantasy that can’t be scratched? Try “fucked and sucked by the air hostess.” Have you nurtured a mean, unshakable crush on Harley Quinn your whole life? Don’t worry, just be my puddin’ tonight. Have you ever just wanted to jerk off for a lifelong friend in the sweet, comforting solace of your bedroom? Really? That’s pretty specific, but GoneWildAudio has your back.
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“I had to pick one reason that people are drawn to GoneWildAudio, it would be the immersive, intimate nature of audio recordings,” says a GoneWildAudio contributor who prefers to stay anonymous. “In images and videos you get to watch hot, beautiful people having sex which seems to work more than fine for most people. But there is a niche group of people that are drawn to the intimacy and personal nature of erotic audio.”
“Amateurs, men and women,” she continued, “are creating sexual fantasies for each other, not hindered by any physical limitations or expectation, and it can be very alluring in that way. In most GoneWildAudio recordings, the voice in the recording is talking directly to you, and you can imagine him or her exactly as you want them to look. You aren’t just watching other people have sex, you are engaging your own fantasies and get to be one of the participants. It sparks the imagination and is really a lot of fun.”
It might be difficult to tell your significant other to work on her best Harley Quinn voice, but here, in this community, where nobody is making money and everyone is here for the same reason, you’ll find plenty of people who are just as invested in the illusion as you.
“The first audio I posted was ‘I Made Daddy Hard’. It was a script written by someone else which matched my kinks,” says Heather, a 30-year old who works in media. “The response was overwhelming, after that I discovered that there was a lot of people out there who liked my fantasies too and I began pulling those fantasies out of myself and performing them. It’s like roleplaying a character in the bedroom by yourself, but still fun because you get to share it with so many others.”
Heather is one of the more active voices on GoneWildAudio, and as she mentioned, a lot of her work has some sort of incestuous bent. A couple of her more recent files include “sister’s slutty schoolgirl sleepover,” “mum teaches daughter how to please her boyfriend,” and of course, “you can’t fuck me, I’m a nun.” If you’re the sort of person who gets off on the idea of having sex with your sister, you’re probably not going to get what you’re looking for through the goofy jiggles of mainstream porn. Incest might be the most common tropes in the history of smut, but it’s rarely so stark and intimate. She’ll indulge every perversion, focus on every crucial detail, and only let go after a solid 15 minutes. There’s never a moment of self-consciousness or inauthenticity. Heather focuses on the confession as much as she does the fucking. This is real life. One of her darkest recordings, “train rape,” is about as real and unfunny as she can muster. She screams, she begs, it ends in tears. It’s sickening and it’s supposed to be.
“I mainly love GWA because of its creativity and expression, even better because it’s in a sexual manner. I keep posting new audios because I love the positivity it gives me, I love the compliments, I love pleasing people and most of all, I love making others orgasm,” she says. “I enjoy the weird and wonderful, and people inspire me to explore other sexual aspects that I’ve never even thought of.”
Even if you’re not gregarious enough to be an artist on GoneWildAudio, you can still get involved in the community by penning your own scripts and requests. The ecosystem allows you to post scenarios that can be picked up and fulfilled by any number of generous creators. Right now there’s a hapless user named rubber_floal looking for someone to help him realize his “sex with a very tall girl” fantasy.
“Things that would work for me would be talking about the attention she receives for being so tall, some of the perks/difficulties she faces like having to duck under doorways, maybe talk of being a volleyball/basketball player,” he writes. “Sexually speaking there would be some difficulty with some positions, like for doggystyle her legs would be too long so I would have to use a pillow to reach that height.”
Speaking of sexual aspects you’ve never thought of, the fringe nature of GoneWildAudio can’t be ignored. There are plenty of casual, tasteful scenarios, but this community mostly focuses on the more sadistic side of the spectrum. Some of the most popular files on the subreddit have titles like “fucking the nurse to tears,” “your big sister is your cum dumpster now,” or perhaps most inexplicably “dear best friend can you cum on my face please?” It’s a lot of violence. All made by consenting adults—but certainly not for the faint of heart.
And, this makes sense. Having “normal” fantasies comes with enough baggage as it is; a hardcore incest fantasy, or a rape one, is much trickier to either indulge or escape. GoneWildAudio seems to be a safe space to mollify those taboos without doing anything drastic.
It’s actually kind of affectionate. SexuallySpecific’s “Your big sister is your cum dumpster now” might be the filthiest thing I’ve ever heard. “Fill my tight sister-hole with your hot brother cum. Yeah brother so nasty, I need to be punished for being so nasty.” It’s the sort of thing that falls, far, far outside what you’re supposed to be getting off to, but the comments are remarkably clean, supportive, and un-pervy. GWA treats their creators like you and I regard any other transcendent performance.
“The gasps. ‘Look into my eyes’ bit. The giggles. Seriously, this was so hot. You are amazing at recording erotica, but you knew that already. Thank you so much, SexuallySpecific.” wrote user phoenix_phobia.
“I’m so glad you enjoyed it!” she replied.
“How can I not enjoy it when you gave a performance like that?” the user replied.
“The biggest draw of kinks in this [audio] form is that it feels very personal without any of the shame that you would have when actually acting it out with someone,” says a college student in the Netherlands who contributes to GoneWildAudio. “The one-sidedness protects you in a way, while the format still engages you to a level that can feel very satisfying. Which can be very freeing, especially if you’ve been only been vanilla because anything further scared you.”
It’s easy to get discouraged by the ways our relationship to erotica has changed over the last 10 years. Attention spans are shrinking, nobody is getting paid, the industry is getting progressively more artless. As in every arena, the internet has overextended us, and as with all media—from film to music to journalism—pornography is struggling to adapt in a world where everything is free.
But then you look at GoneWildAudio, and you see an insular community supporting each other, celebrating each other, and communicating with each other all in the name of getting off. The internet can destroy a lot of things it touches, but it can also create wonderful, ultra-specific communities out of thin air. GoneWildAudio is smut and self-care, and also friendship. It’s as intimate as any on-demand clip site is numb.
Recently a community member named “newhusband” died after a long battle with cancer. He was just a fan, making the occasional vanilla request, and listening to smut in his own, quiet way. A couple months before he passed, he posted a goodbye note:
“To you fine people, thank you. You made me feel loved, wanted, special, just everything. You guys have helped me so much. Thank you so much. I’m not good with words, so excuse my post. I love you guys so much. You are wonderful people. My request, is that you don’t forget me. That’s all I want. I will miss this community so much. Thank you GoneWildAudio. I will listen for as long as I can.”
Here we are on a forum for smutty audio erotica. It is a place to escape, to fantasize, to leave this world behind. But somehow, it’s also become a place to be adored. True acceptance is a powerful drug.
“This community empowers so many in their sexuality from the shy and timid to the bold and brave,” says an anonymous GoneWildAudio contributor. “Be exactly who you are. That’s all this community requires. It tries to make you feel okay for being into whatever it is that you’re into, and that it’s a part of what makes you… you. And that you that you are is sexy regardless of the kink or fetish that gets you off.”
Luke Winkie is a journalist and former pizza maker living in Los Angeles. He writes and reports for Red Bull, Sports Illustrated, Vice, Daily Dot, Buzzfeed, and where ever else good content can be found. Follow him on Twitter @luke_winkie.
Image via Paramount